Saturday, April 14, 2012

Pray With Us

Our team recently discovered another blog, pray4bulgaria.wordpress.com, that deals with praying for Bulgaria. The site features a Virtual Prayer Walk through Sofia, the nation's capital. Basically, its a Powerpoint presentation that highlights 38 different topics to pray about for the nation. For instance:

This particular slide describes a deeply spiritual issue facing Bulgaria... atheism.

We as a team have decided to go through all 38 prayer topics together, taking one a day. We began on Thursday with the first slide and plan to continue through the entire series. Rather than ending there, though, we are going to follow up by adding specific prayer topics every day that relate to the individual churches, ministries, and people we are connected to.

We are going to pray specifically and daily for Bulgaria right up to our departure and we hope you'll consider joining us. Visit the Virtual Prayer Walk and start today!

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

We Got Our Tickets Today!

Its official... We're going!! Not that there was any doubt, but I always seem to figuratively hold my breath until we've actually purchased the tickets. As of today, that's out of the way. We will be flying out of Las Vegas at 6 am on Tuesday morning, June 26 and returning at 6:58 pm on Thursday evening, July 12.

The 2008 team catching rest in the Frankfurt airport.
Of course, the 6 am departure means we have to be at the airport by 4 am, which means we have to leave Bullhead at 2 am! Will we get any sleep the night before? Probably not ;-) We arrive in Sofia at 12:10 pm on Wednesday which is 2:10 in the morning back home, so total travel time from BHC to BG is just over 24 hours. It makes for a VERRRYYY  long day, but so worth it. We don't get a lot of sleep while we're in Bulgaria anyway, so the trip just helps get us acclimated. We have a saying while were there (that we stole from Pastor CJ)... We can sleep when we're dead!

In case I haven't brought you up to speed, the final makeup of the team is as follows:
Joey Leslie, Linzi Drew, Mike Kern, Megan Kern, Vernon Garrett, Roy Garrett, Brijon Ortiz, and Brittany Hogle.

Pastor Chuck and Lynda are taking the year off to allow him to fully recuperate from his accident last fall. The team is a bit smaller than years past (we usually take 12-14 people), but most are returning veterans and the new members, Brijon and Brittany, are a welcome addition. We're really excited about  the work the Lord has planned this year!

Later this week, we're supposed to be getting an update from the group at the Blaga Vest church in Sofia that is handling the week-long camp at the Black Sea. Once we hear from them, we'll have a much better picture of our schedule and responsibilities for that week and I'll be sharing details as soon as they fall into place. It's gonna be a great trip!

God Bless...
Mike Kern